Sunday, August 17, 2014

The evidence accumulates not to trust data from NY State Education Department

On
Friday afternoon I got a call from the Daily News reporter Stephen Rex Brown,
who told me that the NY State Education Department had provided him with data purporting to show that this spring, more than
22,000 NYC kids opted out of the NY state ELA exams and more than 26,000 the math exams – out of a total of 66,000 statewide.Here is the data straight from NYSED:

ELA

2013

2014

Region

Count

Count

% State Non-Participation

State Wide

13120

55564

Nassau

1605

6493

11.7%

Suffolk

1316

8866

16.0%

Westchester

399

8827

15.9%

NYC

6003

22656

40.8%

Rest of State

5505

8722

15.7%

Math

2013

2014

Region

Count

Count

% State Non-Participation

State Wide

15164

65617

Nassau

1978

12876

19.6%

Suffolk

1806

18888

28.8%

Westchester

456

1645

2.5%

NYC

4358

26949

41.1%

Rest of State

10924

5259

8.0%

As
you can see, the number of “non-participating” NYC students appears to have ballooned four
times or more since 2013, so it was unlikely to be explained away by truancy or
simple absence.

As much as I would have
liked to believe the opt out figures were this high, I expressed skepticism to Stephen–
and explained that I thought the numbers of students opting out had been far higher on Long Island and
Westchester than in NYC.In the suburbs,
in general, parents are more organized, enjoy well-funded public schools with
high college-going and graduation rates, and have erupted in justified incredulity when the state tried
to convince them their schools were failing and their kids were not “college
and career ready.”

Stephen
also told me that the state was holding firm, despite the fact that the city was
arguing that less than 2,000 students had opted out, according to
their data.

State
Education officials were scrambling to determine Friday why test data
appeared to show more than 20,000 city students did not take math and English
exams…. The figures were more than triple the previous year’s numbers.
State officials suspect there was an error in the way a large group of city
students were coded in the state database of third- through eighth-graders who
took the tests.

My response to all this:
with such erratic and unreliable information, how can anyone trust any of the
test score data from NYSED?

I admit
to being discouraged by the sadly ritualistic appearance of Mayor de Blasio and
the Chancellor Farina, celebrating the small increase in scores in the city
based on these highly faulty and unreliable exams as evidence of progress.The Mayor was even moved to give
credit to Bloomberg for his support of Common Core and his supposed
“investment in our schools”, though school budgets have been cut to the bone
and we have the largest class sizes in 15 years.

Before
the new Common Core tests, we had ten
years of state test score inflation in NY that was obvious to anyone paying
close attention, but year after year was ignored by the powers that be, because
it was politically convenient.Each year Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein, sometimes
accompanied by Randi Weingarten, would ritualistically bow down to the supposedly infallible test
score gods and celebrate the results as showing that their reforms were working. And then the entire imaginary edifice came tumbling down in 2010, when the educrats finally admitted that an enormous test score inflation had occurred, somehow without their knowledge and complicity.

It is
too early to assume that the small rise in test scores this year were due to similar
manipulations , but
a decade of experience should teach us to be open to the possibility. Merryl
Tisch predicted
that more kids would pass this year – and they did. In any event, we have overwhelming evidence from teachers and principals that the
tests were poor
quality and a lousy judge of real learning.

The state’s
release of data showing thousands of opt outs in NYC is just one more piece of
evidence showing how skeptical everyone should be about any data our
government officials supply.

They are central to
a “shock
doctrine” strategy, engineered to make parents believe that their children’s
schools are deficient, to enable privatization and instruction to be outsourced
to corporations.Whether test scores go up
or down, parents should beware not to drink the Common
Core Kool-aid and allow themselves to be convinced by faulty data -- either produced by incompetent bureaucrats or skewed for
political ends.

2 comments:

It will be very hard to tell the real numbers of opt out for New York City. On the answer grid for these tests, any opt out student should have been coded refused to take the test. I believe many just marked students absent for the examinations instead of using the refusal category. If a parent kept a student home for each day of the assessment, to me, that is an opt out. However, the refusal was coded only if a parent wrote a formal letter to the school saying that the child was going to refuse to take the assessment. I should know because I am a retired test coordinator.

I wouldn't assume a mistake. With schools like Earth School, PS321, and others having nearly all of their student opt out plus more and more parents joining the cause, a few thousand out of a million doesn't seem that off.